The Other Partisan
/I don’t usually get to The Other Partisan: Newark is normally too far to go on one of the few days off I get each week.
This year, however, I did get to go: mainly because I had promised to drive my daughter’s rollerscate of a car up to Edinburgh for her, and Newark provided a reasonable waypoint on the journey: drive to Newark on the Sunday, do Partisan, stay overnight, then do the rest of the journey on the Monday.
So I did get to go to Partisan, and great fun it was too. Lots of good trade stands, although I didn’t actually buy anything (still far too much in the lead mountain!) and, almost more importantly, a huge number of very impressive demonstration and participation games.
And what a lot of Lard on show too!
In all, I think there were six games featuring Lardy rules: Big Rich was running CoC (more on that later); Mike Whitaker had brought his Omaha game; the Like A Stone Wall chaps were there with their Peleliu game; Matt Slade was also playing CoC, but desert-style; there was a Sharp Practice Ancients variant; and a huge WW2 Normandy CoC game too. That’s six Lard games in all. Here are some pictures:
I even managed to get a battle in as well: I played the Fallschirmjaegers attempting to capture a Dutch windmill in Richard’s afternoon CoC participation game.
After I’d watched the FJs getting beaten in the morning through attempting to use no tactics at all - just trying to overwhelm their Dutch reservist opponents through sheer firepower - I was determined to do better. A bit of the old feint to the right, then pin with the centre and attack on left soon had the Cloggies defeated…although the way my opponent’s young daughter was rolling the dice meant that the path to victory was definitely not all plain sailing. Very nerve-wracking in fact.
Third Fallschirmjaeger squad at the moment of their victory!
So, all in all, a very good show indeed. Highly recommended.
